


Rule Number One

by EzraBlake



Category: The Dark Triad - Fandom
Genre: Dubious Consent, Eye Licking, Eye Sex, Eye Trauma, Illustrations, M/M, Major Character Injury, Pining, Stockholm Syndrome, Unspecified Setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:41:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25841533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EzraBlake/pseuds/EzraBlake
Summary: A vignette written for the lovely Aotar to illustrate.Ivan is injured. Chris doesn't remember how to survive without pain.(Semi-canon. Follows Psychostasis, but spoilers are minimal and quite vague.)
Relationships: Ivan Skinner/Christopher Dour
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	Rule Number One

**Author's Note:**

> With gorgeous NSFW watercolor by [Aotar](https://www.deviantart.com/aotar-le-quaint).
> 
> If you're confused, this is based off my original novel, which you can find floating around the internet for free.

Christopher has done his time, and it taught him plenty. Some lessons were implied. Others were delivered with all the humility of a key speaker at conference for megalomaniacs. Collected, they form a rough instruction manual for dealing with the miserable ordeal that is human existence: _Ivan Skinner’s Unofficial Guide to the Good Life._ Following these rules has kept Chris alive, perhaps for too long, and they hold true whether your god is Allah, Christ, Mother Nature, or Ivan.

Rule one: Don’t cope.

When awful things happen for no discernible reason, that’s the reason. The point is that’s it’s happening—he really _is_ snapping your fingers in half; you really _are_ stuck in this coffin until he decides otherwise—and if you try to weasel your way out of feeling it, not only are you missing the point, but you’ll make things harder on yourself in the long run. He’ll ramp up the pain until you have no choice but to feel it, so don’t cope. It doesn’t help.

Chris understands this, intellectually, but that doesn’t make it easy. His instinct is to shove down those hot bursts of agony that pulse through him every time a stranger touches Ivan’s skin. When they don gloves and masks and load Ivan onto the stretcher, it’s all Chris can do to stay in his body. Be present for the pain. They’re trying to help. But God, do they have to be so rough with him?

Ivan makes weak sounds of protest when they jostle him, but the goons act as though they don’t here. They won’t even look at him when he speaks. He lies on the stretcher, face contorted in the failed effort to move his own body, and when he asks a simple question—“Where are we going?”—nobody answers until Chris vehemently repeats it.

“We have medical facilities,” the largest man says. He’s built like a truck, bulky and solid except his face, which is sagging off his skull.

Ivan says, “I’ve told you before, darling, I can defend my own honor. This isn’t a battle worth fighting.”

“Why not?” Chris snaps, ignoring the guards’ concerned glances. “Ivan is a person, you know. He’s a surgeon.”

Again, only the huge one responds: “We’ll take good care of him.”

The pile out on the other side of the sliding gate. Two women unload the stretcher and start toward one of the buildings, but when Chris tries to follow, the goon stops him. “We have a room for you,” he says.

“I want to go with Ivan.”

He places a broad hand on Christopher’s shoulder, but Chris shrugs it off.

“You need to clean up first. We can’t risk contamination.” He herds Chris in the opposite direction of the stretcher. It’s happening too fast. Before he’s out of earshot, Chris calls out:

“I love you! Ivan!”

But if Ivan answers, it’s too faint to hear.

_Feel that agony. Don’t cope._

The giant, Luther, guards his bedroom. He has a grey beard which he plucks with his fingernails when he thinks nobody is looking. The skin on his knuckles is always dry, often cracked deep enough to bleed, shiny with vaseline or Neosporin. He’s a man of few words. Most of them are, “I’ll tell you as soon as I know something.”

He knows nothing. He’s a brute and an idiot, always lounging in that folding chair, scribbling something useless in a notebook. Chris got a glimpse of it on his failed midnight expedition. Luther was awake and writing: _…Francesca drew her sword. “You will never deceive me,” she said. “I was blessed with the clear sight of the Elders.”_ Then he snapped the book shut and gave Chris that awful steady stare and said, “Do you need something?”

“Hot water. For tea. Can’t sleep.”

“I’ll send for it,” Luther said, and he had no choice but to return to his room after that.

For the past twenty-four hours, he’s seen nothing but this room, the hallway outside, and the colorful figures scurrying around the lawn beneath his window, hauling wood and tile in little wheelbarrows. A fight broke out this morning between a person in green and a person in blue. The guards—in black—quickly broke it up and dragged both participants away. When he asked about it later, Luther only shrugged and said, “It happens.”

He has similarly vague answers for every question. Where’s Latzke? He’s busy. When’s dinner? Soon. Who the fuck do you think you are, keeping me locked up in here? Just following orders. And of course, when he asks about Ivan, the answer is always the same: I’ll tell you as soon as I know something. He said Chris would be allowed to see him before he went into surgery—which makes him a fucking _liar_ , too.

He sees Latzke once, in the hall, looking small and ferrety beside a tall man in a lab coat who is visibly irritating him. Chris waves to him and calls out, “Hey, I need to talk to you!” But he only glances over his shoulder, pulls his lips tight, and walks on. Luther gets an earful, since he’s the only available target for this unbearable, acidic frustration. He takes it with the usual stoicism even when Chris starts screaming.

They bring him what he asks for: food and books and even a laptop. He has nobody left to email. The world has moved on without him. News from the States is focused on presidential elections at the expense of all else, and nobody writes about the Butcher anymore. There have been more murderers since Ivan, but none of them have half the flair.

He sleeps a lot. More than once he considers jumping out the window. Each time he decides that the third floor is too high up, and that suicide counts as coping, so it’s off limits. He tries to punch Luther instead. Luther absorbs it like a sponge and guides him gently back to his room.

There is nothing to do but wait. He should be good at waiting—he’s done it for longer, in less comfortable spaces—but he isn’t. It was easier when he knew Ivan was just outside his prison, prepared to torture him at his next convenience.

“I want to talk to someone,” Chris says, when Luther brings him steak and potatoes that night. “Anyone.”

“Sure,” Luther says. “Let’s talk.”

“Anyone else.”

He hums and shakes his head. “Don’t think I can do that, but I’ll ask.”

Nobody arrives. Chris pokes his head out the door again and says, “I want to fuck someone. Isn’t that what you do here?”

The only person he wants to fuck is currently undergoing experimental surgery, of course, but it can’t hurt to speak a language these people understand.

Again, Luther says, “I’ll see what I can do.”

At midnight, he knocks on the door holding a paper bag. Chris snatches it from his hand and dumps it on the bed. Inside are two dildos, lube, and a fleshlight.

For some reason, that’s what finally gets to him. He sits on the plush chaise with his head in his hands and dry-sobs until he starts to feel stupid, and then he pulls aside the curtains, cream-colored and embossed with velvety gold leaves, and he opens the window. The night is cool and smells like cut grass, which used to trigger his hay fever but doesn’t now—he outgrew the allergy, or else his immune system has mobilized to fight more urgent threats. He peers down at the quad. It’s empty and the lights are off. The only sounds are the faint rustle of foliage and some muffled shouting, drifting in from somewhere distant or well-insulated.

Chris wipes his eyes, though they’re dry, and chucks the sex toys out the window. The dildo bounces off the sidewalk and rolls to a stop on the lawn.

He sits at the desk and pokes at his cold steak. It smells bloody. He closes his eyes.

He's eating dinner, strapped to the dining chair with thick, padded nylon restraints. Ivan holds a spoonful of soup to his own lips and blows the steam away before offering it to Chris. “Bone broth, simmered for six days,” he says. “I daresay we've sucked life's marrow dry, in this case.”

A decent therapist would call these moments trauma, but Ivan calls them 'pivots.' They are the fulcrums upon which Christopher's understanding of himself and the world hinges. They're red and sweet violet, arranged like little vignette boxes, trimmed and polished through endless repetition. They are exquisite.

If he dims the lights and closes the windows and listens, their scripts unravel in his head, casting uncanny puppet shadows on the backs of his eyelids. He’s gazing up at Ivan's perfect silhouette and mouthing wordless prayers. He's starving—please, he’s _starving_ to death—and his muscles are jelly and his tongue tastes dry and filthy. Ivan strokes his hair. Ivan backhands him so hard that his head knocks against the door of his cell.

Sweet, violet vignette.

He shuffles through the scenes. This is how he lulled himself to sleep in Florence, on the nights Ivan was distant. Each vision is clearer. If he keeps it up for a few more months, he might even reclaim the pain itself.

God. Anything to have that hurt back.

He strips off his clothes and hides under the blankets. Eyes closed. Window closed. He's in Ivan's bedroom, which is safer than the study or the kitchen even though Ivan has broken three of his fingers here, even though the grating shudder of bone is still woven into his Egyptian cotton sheets and entombed in the wallpaper paste.

Chris kneels beside the bed in his blue cotton boxer-briefs, now worn so thin that his cock peeks through the weave. He presses his face into Ivan's bare thigh and touches his fingertips to Ivan's ankle, meets no resistance there, and slides them higher, toward his left sock garter. Chris has no intention of removing it, but he loves to test the strength of the elastic. It’s a game he plays with himself—will Ivan snap him in return? How much harder? But Ivan only hums and pulls his face closer, to the junction of his hip and groin. Inhale.

The image freezes. A frown creases Christopher's forehead. Ivan’s scent evolved over time, from sharp and floral to woody, musky warmth. What cologne was he wearing that evening? Had he washed? To Christopher's utter horror, he can't remember.

The only way through is to move on. The scent is gone, erased, history. Invent something.

It feels like blasphemy.

He inhales, conjuring cedar. Atop that he layers sandalwood—a hint of that dangerous edge—and damp soil. Too dark. Bitter melon for the flourish.

That's good enough, and the still frame lurches forward. Inhale. Ivan's flesh burns against his cheek. He mouths and nuzzles until his silk boxers are damp and translucent and Chris tastes skin. Breathe, drink, nourish—if Ivan never pushed his head away, he could survive on the scent alone.

"Enough," Ivan says at last. Chris kneels back. His feet are going numb. He didn't notice until now. "Stay exactly there," Ivan says. "Don't move."

He doesn’t move. He knows better than Ivan that he must remain perfectly aligned. As long as he trains his every breath, conquers every twitch of every tiny muscle in his face, Ivan’s warmth will stay. He would stop his own heart if he could.

Whatever Ivan needs is in the bedside drawer, where he kept his dental appliances. It could be teeth. It could be all of them. The possibility has crossed his mind before, but now that he’s hard and straining against his thigh, the pros come dangerously close to outweighing the cons. Who but Ivan will ever see his smile?

But Ivan, seasoned ringmaster that he is, rarely pulls the same trick twice. He returns with two metal devices which are too narrow to hold Christopher's mouth open but too wide to grip a tooth. “Do you know what these are?” He asks.

Christopher’s voice catches several times in his throat, and when he speaks, it’s low and raspy: “No, Doctor.”

Are these the first words he’s spoken today? Did he speak yesterday, or the day before that?

Never mind. Ivan is shaking his head and _tsk_ ing at him, which means he expects better. Chris wracks his brain. The little levers are like nothing he’s ever seen before, except…

“Eyelash curlers?” He asks.

Ivan chuckles. It’s a glorious sound. He could listen to that sound on loop for twenty years and never get bored.

“Close. Very close, darling. I suppose your lecturers didn’t cover ophthalmology before your…unfortunate withdrawal from the program.”

He cocks his head. Ophthalmology. Eyes, study of.

“Retractors,” Ivan supplies. “Also known as speculums. As I’m sure you know…”

The image blurs, here, and they become a haze of latex gloves and fingertip-touches.

No. _Not good enough._ He rewinds. Replays. Chris needs those touches, needs to pick them apart and draw cause-and-effect chains—index finger plus tear duct equals sick twist of violation, equals this _specific_ discomfort—but it’s a mess, and he can’t untangle it.

It’s almost enough to stop the recollection. What’s the fucking point if he can’t get it right? But Ivan keeps moving through the haze, and there’s a phrase in there somewhere, ringing in his cut-crystal voice: “Tears are to be expected.” And that's irresistible, blur or not.

He’s back in the bedroom. His face is damp and the air smells like fear and latex. His eyes are parched and restless, stretched wide. Ivan flicks one of the speculums, rocking the arms against his eyeball. Revulsion shudders down his spine.

“Are you afraid I’m going to blind you?”

Chris can't answer. It’s another verbal trap. Ivan will wind his words around themselves until Chris is begging to be blinded and thinks it’s his own idea.

“Poor thing.” He pats Christopher’s cheek. The motion jostles the speculum again, spikes that existential nausea like a needle through his brainstem. “I suppose you’ll have to wait and see.” He draws closer with each word.

This next part is excruciatingly clear: he dips his tongue into Christopher’s left eye and licks along the pink, angry flesh of his lower lid. He skims the surface of the eyeball. Chris can fucking see it, still, the murky pink blur and the…sparkle, almost, the little burst of light where there should be no light. It doesn’t hurt, but it shouldn’t happen. His soul is heaving in his chest, trying to tear its way out through his ribcage.

When Ivan pulls back, half of his grin is smeared up his cheek. His face, as viewed through the oily fingerprint smudge on the rim of a wine glass. But the smudge is on Christopher’s eye.

“Cry more,” he says. “It cleans away debris.”

In his gigantic, empty bed, Chris sobs into the pillow. His hand has found its way down his pajama pants. When he blinks up at the ceiling, no portion of his vision is blurred, and that makes him cry harder.

Ivan palms the straining bulge of his cock, raw pink beneath the damp, cream-colored fabric. He inches the boxers down his legs, meets Christopher’s unblinking gaze, and then lets his cock spring up from the elastic waistband, flinging a little drop of precome to the carpet.

Chris can’t look away. He doesn't want to look away but now he _can’t_ ; he has no choice but to watch as Ivan licks his palm and gives himself one slow stroke from base to tip.

His hands are free. All he needs to do is squeeze the speculums and pull them out, but he doesn’t move. He’s pinned like a live-mounted moth, fluttering its ruined wings, its every motion ripping deeper furrows. Each aborted facial spasm sends his eyes twitching up or down Ivan’s body, from his cock to his face and back again. Ivan blinks. He strokes. He closes his eyes in ecstasy, and Chris sees every tiny motion of his eyelids; he catalogues each warm, damp reprieve from air and sight because he _cannot have those._ The sting doubles each time Ivan closes his eyes and Chris doesn’t. It scatters across his cornea and wraps his eyeballs, spreads down his cheeks, just short of agony. If it hurt more, it would be distracting, and he’d be spared his own unrelenting focus on the twist of Ivan's upstroke.

“What was that?”

He’d blink, here, if he could.

Ivan slows to a languid caress. “ _Please?_ ”

Chris presses his dry lips together. Did he say that? Did he speak?

“P-please,” he adds, in case he didn’t.

“Please what?”

“Let me…” His hips twitch. He shakes his head in attempt to clear the film of tears, but more tears take their place.

“I don’t think so.” Even as he says it, Ivan leans forward, until his cock is an inch away from Christopher’s open mouth. Without thinking, he sticks out his tongue. Ivan chuckles. “No, keep that to yourself,” he says. “But I like the begging.”

A starburst of joy ricochets through him. There go the lights again, streaky and ephemeral, perhaps signaling imminent blindness. “Please,” he repeats, with ardor. “Doctor Skinner, let me suck your cock, please, I need—

Ivan twangs the speculum, setting his vision rocking again. “I told you no,” he says, and before he’s even finished his sentence Chris is whimpering _I’m sorry, I’m sorry,_ and _please let me touch myself, Doctor, I_ —

“No.” The other eye, this time. The smooth metal slides against his socket. Nothing should ever, ever touch him there.

“I’m sorry,” he whines. Another trap. No right answers. “What should I…?”

“Beg,” Ivan repeats. He’s stroking faster now, tighter, so close to Christopher’s face that he could almost _almost_ taste him if he tried. A scream is building in his chest. Beg for _what?_ No right answers. No winning, ever, no avoidance, nothing but the worst-case—

_Oh._

He feels it now, with the pillow pressed between his legs, working his hips and biting his fist. That ripple of agonized certainty is just as fresh as it was all those months ago, when the realization first hit him. He rides it, cradles it, submerses himself. Drown in this, maybe. Live here.

“Please—”

He says this twice, on this bed and on his knees, eyes spread open and squeezed shut.

“—please, Doctor, please come in my eyes.”

Ivan growls, grips his hair, and tips his head back. He drags Chris forward until he’s kneeling with his chest against the mattress, knees splayed, gazing up at the blur of his hand.

“Please blind me.”

Tears and snot dripping down his face, burning little eddies of air.

“I want your—”

This reversal, this horrible trick, always. The only way out is through.

“Want you cock to be the last thing I. The last thing—”

The first splash catches the bridge of his nose, and he jerks back. Too late. Ivan cups his skull and the next one lands. It's boiling ocean water; it's grit and bleach and his eyes roll back in his head and his vision is burning milky white. He aches with the wasted, involuntary effort of squeezing against the spreaders.

It isn’t so awful—not compared to the beatings or broken bones. Just awful enough to demand presence of mind. He rolls his eyes again and imagines sperm burrowing beneath his lids. Wonders if he might cry blood. Wonders if Ivan would like him to cry blood. He catalogues.

That’s why it’s so clear that it’s nearly happening, almost a year later. That’s why he’s leaking tears as he squeezes the pillow between his thighs and comes.

Ivan slithers to the floor and holds him. Blur of his silk nightshirt, his sweat against Christopher’s forehead. He cups both cheeks and meets his tortured gaze.

Closer. Then one eye goes dark.

Chris squeals. He orders his body to stay still, but it doesn’t listen, and he strains away from Ivan’s mouth, which clamps tighter and sucks. Horrific, alien pressure. The tip of his tongue slips beneath Christopher’s upper lid and he’s sucking, he’s going to suck the eyeball right out of its socket if he doesn’t stop. Chris is wailing now, wordless vowels and _Doctor, Doctor_ and—

A pop. A shudder.

 _Blind_.  
  


No, his eye is still in his face. Ivan pops his lips again to demonstrate that the sound is nothing to fear. Lazy, sated-predator smile.

He asks, “Shall I do the other?”

And Chris knows how to play, now, so he says, “Yes, please.”

That’s the right answer. The game is over.

Ivan lays him on the mattress like he’s a real human person. He removes the spreaders—furious reflexive blinking ache—and ducks into the bathroom for saline drops. It takes three full bottles and a lot of gloved prying before he’s flushed to Ivan’s satisfaction. Chris cooperates with the saline, the antibiotic drops, and the cold compress. If he's good, Ivan might let him sleep here. Even thirty minutes would be heaven.

In two lives, the tension drains from his body and into the mattress; the assorted fluids drain from his puffy face. In one of them, Ivan is reading. John Milton, he says.

> _When I consider how my light is spent_
> 
> _E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,_
> 
> _And that one Talent which is death to hide,_
> 
> _Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent_
> 
> _To serve therewith my Maker, and present_
> 
> _My true account, least he returning chide,_
> 
> _Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d?  
>  _

In the other, Chris is coping—denial, bargaining, etc., and his pivots, and their perfectly rehearsed vignettes; invented scents and the lost sensation of a shared bed.

Just a few minutes. Even a few more minutes would be heaven.


End file.
